HAVANA'S “INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY"
[The Nation, the well-known liberal weekly in the United States, is one of the rare publications in that sountry which. has sought to present its readers with objective reporting about Cuba. A good example of what it seeks to offer was a letter in the issue of April 27 written from Havana by Marc Schleifer, former editor of the literary magazine Kulchur, who is also editor of Robert Williams! book Negroes with Guns. Of unusual interest, we thought, were Schleiferts observations on the “international sooiety" which has appeared recently "as a by-product of the Revolution" and whose headquarters is Havana. The following paragraphs are extracts from Schleifer's letter, |
Most of the glamour of the new international society is supplied by the transients -- a sudden appearance by Wajda, the Polish film direotor, and his leading lady; a Russian ballet troupe; international assortments of female journalists hungering for an interview with Fidel or Che; Brazil's Juliao, over to visit with his children; Yevtushenko and Adamov; Brazil's Prestes worrying over Juliao; Michel Chartrand, President of Quebec's separatist Parti Socialiste getting to know the Brazilian nationalist, General Leite. And the constant flow of visiting Americans: the forty-nine stud ents, author Louis Lomax, Herbert Mohammud, Jr. (the Prophet's son). As judges for the Casats * Literary Competition there were Italy's novelist, Italo Galvino; the Chilean playwright, Isidora Aguirre, the Spanish poet Blas de Otero; Maria Rosa Oliver, co-founder of Sur; Jacobo Arbenz, former President of Guatemala.
But the real heart of the international community is made up of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Latin Americans, North Americans, Western Europeans and Africans, who have come to Cuba to study, teach or directly provide professional skills. This is a committed community, Unlike the Cubans, who appear too absorbed in their own work to give it much thought fat least out loud), the international community is obsessed and deeply divided by the Ghinese-Russian de-~ bate. Strangely enough, my observations of these particular partisans and their positions completely contradict the rhetorical definitions set by the storm centers of both camps.
Peking claims classic Leninist "orthodoxy" and Moscow -- with its constant references to a "changing world" and "new elements since Lenin's time" -- yields the point, accusing Peking of being "out of touch," "old-fashioned," white dropping all sorts of inferences. about Maots advanced age and dissent among the younger Chinese oadre, But with a few exceptions on both sides, the fundamental division. in Havanats international community is one of age -=- the youth being pro-Chinese and the elderly contingent pro-Russian,
Moscow charges Peking with "rigidity" and "dogmatism," And
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while Peking does not directly accept the epithets, it does issue statements that avoid the issue and stress Mostow!s "revisionism" as a far greater danger. Yet again, with exceptions, the line-up among foreigners contradicts the rhetoric, When I meet someone who is pro-Moscow, he invariably echos the USSR-C.P. line issue for issue, And the phraseology or style is always the same -- almost total recall from Moscow statements. In other words, as dogma, But the pro-Chinese faction seems to have a completely different psyohology. They aren't at all uniformly "pro-Chinese" in the way in which: their opposites are "pro-Russian." Rather they seem to have arrived. at (through singular and often quite ideologically stylized thought processes and phraseology) a coincidence with the Chinese position. | The coincidence (no matter how it is arrived at) is invariably that . of the primacy of "the armed struggle for national liberation," . Beyond that, there is less hesitation to openly discuss or even ori ticize secondary issues and tactical moves of "their" side.
Finally, it is almost mutually accepted rhetoric that Peking is “more sectarian" and Moscow less so, in their respective world appeal. Yet, with the exception of a few nervous social~democrats who cannot be considéred "committed" and who favor. Moscow for their own reasons, the pro-Russian faction is limited to people with direct or associative Communist Party backgrounds. The pro-Chinese formation is almost. outrageously unsectarian: in addition to party — militants it contains all sorts of tendencies in transition to some. sort of regrouping and unity as New Communists: New Leftists, - Latin American Fidelistas and Left-Nationalists, C. Wright Millsians, Revolutionary Beatniks, Black Nationalists, younger~generation Trotskyists, even an occasional Anarcho-Syndicalist. And they are quick to note that it is the "sectarian" Chinese who have reprinted and widely circulated Fidel's speeches against sectarianism, where~ as with rare exceptions the Moscow-aligned Communist Parties all over the world have ignored these speeches or published only carefully edited selections,
SOVIET MILITARY AID FOR INDIA
The New York Times revealed May 13 that